How Does the Electoral College Work?

What is the Electoral College?

The Electoral College is a group of people that elects the president and the vice president of the United States. (The word “college” in this case simply refers to an organized body of people engaged in a common task.)

As voters head to the polls on Tuesday, they will not vote for the presidential candidates directly, in a popular vote. Instead, they will vote to elect specific people, known as “electors” to the college. Each state gets a certain number of electoral votes based on its population.

The electors are appointed by the political parties in each state, so if you vote for Donald J. Trump on Tuesday, and Mr. Trump ends up winning the popular vote in your state, then electors that the Republican Party has chosen will cast votes for him in their state capitals in December.

The electors are asked to cast their votes on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December. This year, that’s Dec. 19.

But most people don’t pay attention to that because, technically, it’s the election of the electors that matters. And on Election Day, we’re electing the electors who elect the president. Got it?

How many electoral votes does it take to win the presidency?

It takes at least 270 electoral votes to win the presidency. There are 538 electoral votes in all.

In 2008, CNN projected Barack Obama as the winner of the presidential election after the then-senator skyrocketed from 220 electoral votes to 297 votes after results from some Western states, including California, came in.

Has an elector ever ‘gone rogue’ or broken his or her promise? Would that be legal?

Yes, this has happened many times. There’s even an insulting name for an elector who does so: a “faithless elector.”

But faithless electors have never affected the final result of any presidential election. And there haven’t been many in modern times; the last time was in 2004, when an anonymous elector in Minnesota cast his vote for John Edwards instead of the Democratic candidate, John Kerry. (Other electors thought that this might have been an honest mistake.)

More than a dozen states do not have laws on the books to punish faithless electors, meaning that an elector could legally change his or her mind and defy the popular vote. But according to the federal archives: “Electors generally hold a leadership position in their party or were chosen to recognize years of loyal service to the party. Throughout our history as a nation, more than 99 percent of electors have voted as pledged.”

Do electoral votes have a direct impact on Senate or congressional elections?

They do not.

How many electoral votes does each state have?

Every state gets at least three electoral votes, because a state’s number of electors is identical to the total number of its senators and representatives in Congress. Seven states have the minimum three electors.

Washington, D.C., also has three electoral votes, thanks to the 23rd Amendment, which gave the nation’s capital as many electors as the state with the fewest electoral votes.

California has the most electoral votes, with 55. Texas is next, with 38. New York and Florida have 29 apiece.

Here’s a map with the numbers.

Do all of a state’s electoral votes go to one candidate?

In every state except two, the party that wins the popular vote gets to send all of its electors to the state capital in December.

In the nonconforming Maine and Nebraska, two electoral votes are apportioned to the winner of the popular vote, and the rest of the votes are given to the winner of the popular votes in each of the states’ congressional districts. (Maine has two congressional districts and Nebraska has three.)

Has anyone ever won the electoral vote while losing the popular vote?

Yes, this has happened four times. (At this point, people who were tuned in for the 2000 election are sneering at this explainer.)

In 2000, Al Gore was found to have won the popular vote by more than half a million votes, despite having lost to George W. Bush in an election that was sealed by a Supreme Court decision.

Andrew Jackson won the popular vote in 1824, but eventually lost the election to John Quincy Adams. In 1876, Samuel Tilden had more popular support than Rutherford B. Hayes, but lost the electoral vote. And Grover Cleveland lost the 1888 election to Benjamin Harrison despite winning the popular vote.